Disk Partitioning
Partitioning Primer
Windows partitioning tools
The Win9x family has no partitioning tool other than FDISK, which is a very crude DOS-based program, almost unchanged from the days of DOS 3. It's best avoided unless nothing else is available.
The Win2k family includes the Disk Manager (in the Administrative Tools menu), which is somewhat more useful. This allows partitions to be created, deleted, and formatted, but the partition containing the operating system cannot be changed. This means, for example, that if you install a brand-new disk in a Windows 2k machine, Disk Manager will show it as unpartitioned space, and allow you to create partitions on it as required.
This program is also where you can make use of the Win2k facility to give your partitions whatever drive letters you want (although again the OS partition is fixed).
Win9x follows the DOS method of automatically allocating letters, and it's useful to know how this works when deciding how to partition your disks. Letters are allocated sequentially from C, starting with the first primary partition on the first drive, then the first primary partition on the second drive, until all primaries are accounted for. Letters are then allocated to all logical volumes on the first drive, then all logical volumes on the second, and so on, and finally any additional primary partitions have letters allocated in a similar sequence.
This means that if you have, for example, one disk with a primary partition (C) and a logical volume (D), then add a second disk and create a primary partition on it, the new disk will become D, forcing the original D to become E. On the other hand, if you create an extended partition and logical volume on the new disk, it will be assigned E, leaving the original D unchanged.
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